Advances in the design of many complex systems such as those in the aerospace, automotive, marine and electronics industries have led to the development of numerous mutually-dependent systems. Failures or malfunctions of one or more of these systems often affect other systems, directly or indirectly. Additionally, diagnostics and other analysis of these failures/malfunctions and their direct and indirect effects is often required as part of a certification process. Typically such analyses are manually performed by groups of system analysts, without reference to a system or process capable of facilitating such analyses.
In aircraft programs with federated systems, failure analyses can be straightforward, and usually involve a limited number of systems with easily-understood cascading aircraft-level effects. When performed on complex aircraft systems with highly-integrated architectures, on the other hand, failure analyses can involve many systems with complex cascading effects and aircraft-level impacts that are not easily understood without a complete picture of the event.
Various systems and methods currently exist for performing failure analyses of specific aircraft systems. But these current systems and methods do not always draw attention to all of the systems involved in or implicated by a particular failure/malfunction, or any key systems that may more likely be the root cause of multiple failures/malfunctions. These systems and methods also thus do not visually present data for performing failure analyses in an easily-interpretable manner. Therefore, it may be desirable to have an apparatus and method that takes into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as possibly other issues.